I don’t have a Mac, so I haven’t used GarageBand yet, but I’ve been following its release and its take-up by users very closely. To hear the fruits of this explosion of creativity, visit one of the many online distribution channels for GarageBand recordings that have already begun to appear: MacJukebox, iCompositions, or MacJams.

As I’ve said before, I reckon any software that enables complete novices to make their own music (and not just Rip. Mix. Burn the music of others) has to be pretty much a Good Thing. Good, not only for the self-cultured individual, or for those who want to see more independent cultural production, but even for Culture as a whole. As far as I can tell, GarageBand is ridiculously powerful for its price, and while very simple to use, it is at least to some extent expandable. But the questions I have are more long-term: in the end, does its seamless ease-of-use, its smilingly simple interface, enable or close off the serendipity, misuse, and productive errors that accompany our learning of more “difficult” (Logic) or more “open” (AudioMulch) creative production software? Is it too much to ask for a radically simple entry-level interface that won’t condemn the novice user to following only preset production paths?

It’s too early to tell that story about GarageBand (and I am probably not fully equipped to tell it), but there have already been a few developments that suggest users will pressure Apple to make GarageBand even less a toy, and more a tool for serious leisure, than it already is (and what it “already is” is quite an achievement).

Even the amateur users have quickly tired of simply dragging and dropping the supplied “apple loops” – they are demanding to know how to reverse audio loops, import MIDI files, change the tempo mid-song, and even (god forbid!) escape the four-walled prison of 4/4 time. And the limitations of the software are beginning to show – in fact, the more newbies use it, the more they come to realize what they are missing. For example, GarageBand doesn’t support MIDI out (meaning you can’t use external sound modules like drum machines or synths with it), it doesn’t support Logic’s EXS sampler (despite being built on Logic architecture and sporting some of Logic’s native effects), the software doesn’t come with much sound-editing capability beyond cutting the supplied loops (although you can create loops in another program like ACID and import them), and it is impossible to record more than one track at once.

These limitations seem to be experienced even by “amateurs” as effective limitations on creativity, and as we would expect there are already signs that the hacking has begun.